The Problem

The small city of Ranchi was known for poor street lighting since time anyone remembered – a basic problem that led most people to pull out their smartphones from their pockets post 7 p.m. and not think twice about it. Broken streetlights caused much bigger problems in the city – girls were not allowed out of their homes after 7 p.m. and it caused higher rates of crime.

“Owing to poor street lighting, there had been an increase in the cases of robbery, chain snatching and eve-teasing.”

Nelson Chacko, a university student and a member of the I Lead Ranchi Youth Brigade by Times of India thought more than twice about it. As part of a 3 month long initiative, the young university students wanted to collect ground data via their ground volunteers about exactly where the black spots were.

The Solution

The team used the SocialCops mapping platform to map the black spots using geo tags and generate a report on exactly where the black spots were.

[If it were to be done today we would arm them with our mobile data collection tool, Collect – where they could use low cost android phones to track GPS automatically & click photos of spots where streetlights were broken.]

The Results

At the end of the I Lead Ranchi campaign – the report generated gave the mayor a high level snapshot of where resources needed to be deployed – allowing the Deputy Mayor to quickly deploy resources to localities where they were needed the most.

At the end of the campaign, more than 2000 street lights were installed, out of which 631 were LED lights costing 24,900 rupees per set and 1369 were vapour lights costing 4,138 rupees each. LED’s total cost was 1,57, 11,900 rupees and vapour light’s total cost was 56, 64,922 rupees. Total amount deployed to installing streetlights at the end of the campaign was 2,13,76,822 rupees.